..续本文上一页 the world around you the more frustrated you feel by the inefficiency, corruption, brutality and mediocrity. You can see with very refined types of human beings how difficult life is for them. If you have very high standards and very refined tastes, then you”re going to be upset even by the style of curtains on the wall.

　　Now the empty mind has room for everything: the curtains on the wall, the refined subtleties the beauties, the coarse and the gross. The empty mind is all-embracing. So there isn”t that need to run about trying to pick and choose, control and manipulate. To pick and choose, control and manipulate is always such a frantic way to live, but when you appreciate the empty mind, the cessation of the world, then the mind is receptive to the totality of the whole of it. One begins to just look. Now this is like a child”s mind. I remember as a very young child where I grew up, I”d been able to walk in the countryside in empty fields which had beautiful tiger lilies growing wild in them, and I remember being much impressed with these spring flowers. Such things are discoveries when you are a young child and you don”t have perceptions and views about things. So you”re with the way it is. Then you begin to forget about these things. Now how many people here think: "Oh, another grey cold English winter fog. I wish I were in Tahiti. I wish we could go to some place where there is lots of colour and sunshine." These are conditioned reactions. You see a muddy field and the fog and the grey sky and the mind goes: "I don”t like it. I want to see something else, I want to see sunshine and million spring flowers and bananas and coconuts, mangoes, beautiful azure skies." And so while the eyes are focused on the muddy field, you”re not seeing the mud anymore and there”s just a total rejection of that. So when we talk about meditation, and people accuse us of avoiding the real world, you can challenge them and say: "Where is the real world

　　 What is the world, what is real

　　" Because what is real to many people”s world really has no reality to it. It is just a perception based on delusion - on prejudice, preference and memories.

　　That kind of mind is a mind that is conditioned to react in terms of despair and depression. The world that one is attached to and believes in is never satisfactory and one is never content with it. There is always something wrong with it and there is always going to be something wrong with it. So in the holy life we just realise that whatever happens, its just the way things move and change. We will learn from it, grow with it and open to it. And if difficult and unpleasant situations arise, than thats part of it; that”s just the way things are. Sometimes its very bright and peaceful, sometimes its murky and confused. But if you begin to contemplate murky confusion and radiant bliss as just the way things are, there”s nothing to get depressed or elated about, is there

　　 Radiant bliss is that way, but its not me and mine, and it”s impermanent. The muddy field or the azure blue sky, the heat of the sun or the cold wind of the north; whatever - it all belongs in the mind. There is room for everything, and so there is no reason to feel frightened.

　　Forest Sangha Newsletter: July 1988, Number 5

《Mind Conditions the Mind》全文阅读结束。